UK's budget deficit gone - at a stroke!

Among the cognoscenti (that's me and you, natch) it's long been well known that to understand the UK's financial problems, all that's needed is to get hold of a copy of Wednesday's Guardian. Turn, if you dare, to the sits vac section. Feel a faintness in the head and a weakness in the knees as you gawp incredulously at the words on the pages: "Assistant Teenage Pregnancy Co-ordinator"; "Anti-smoking Outreach Worker";  "Change Management Process Manager"; "Director: Equality and Diversity Interface Analysis", etc., etc. The pages are filled with jumbled jargon half-remembered by a half-wit HR minion from a distance-learning MA that they acquired free with a subscription to "HR Today" - incorporating "How to look busy while doing nothing monthly" or some such tosh.

After a few minutes browsing the headlines, few amongst us have the will to look further but persevere and your final reserves of life-force will all but evaporate when you see the salary figures these superfluous sinecures attract. Yes it's true: not only do these bizarre jobs exist but they pay more than you get my friend and you do something useful (well so you tell me).

Many of us have long known that public sector salaries have, over the last few years, courtesy of the generosity of Gordon Brown, taken off and locked into orbits ever more distant from planet reality. A recent study by some think tank or other put the gap between public and private sector remuneration at over 40%, when you include those meaty public sector pensions. I can believe it. It takes a long time to overturn a myth widely held as beyond debate but finally the penny is dropping: public sector workers get paid too much and this is why the country's skint.

So the answer to our financial woes then is easy - cut public sector pay. Oh, plus get rid of all the flaky jobs...any job with a title which includes the word counsellor/coordinator/process/change/pregnancy/diversity ought to more or less do it.

But having lanced the boil on the surface, let's consider the nature of the bacteria underneath. How did we get ourselves into this mess? The first, obvious (and true) answer is that Big Gordie threw more money at the public sector than it knew what to do with.  But I've got another angle for you.

In the good old days when public sector people got a good pension and job security in return for working in a nasty little office on the wrong side of town and earning peanuts (they still get the first two of course but now they get the fat salary and the swanky office too), the head honchos were called "Town Clerks" rather than "Chief Executives" or "Hospital administrator" instead of "Strategic Director of  Community Health". As their empires became increasingly bloated, they had to come up with more inventive names to justify that extra tier of management and it all added fuel to the turbo charging of the payroll.  My answer then is to get rid of these silly overblown job titles and go back to basics. The use of the term CEO would be banned throughout the public sector. Ditto the title "Director" and don't even get me started on the "strategic" directors of this world:  did you ever hear of a "non-strategic" director?

Let's get real. The NHS is there to cure the sick. It does not need armies of "directors", whether "strategic", "executive" or otherwise. And your local council is there to empty your bins and fix the pot-holes in your road. The fact that the public sector seems to think this requires a bloke on £200k a year and a Mercedes shows how detached from reality they've become. Giving them some normal job titles would be a big step on the way to bringing them back to earth.